


Fisher Cat Cry

by livenudebigfoot



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Cabin Fic, Fix-It, M/M, Post-Canon, but wreck-it fic also, gratuitous wilderness porn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-05
Updated: 2017-08-27
Packaged: 2018-07-21 19:57:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7401739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/livenudebigfoot/pseuds/livenudebigfoot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lionel wasn't ready to be so far apart from things.</p><p>He wasn't ready for any of it, really.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I thought it was dumb that Fusco got to keep his job instead of being obviously, extremely fired and maybe on the run at the end of the finale. And then I wrote this.

His closest neighbor's house is 30 yards away. He can see the brown slope of the roof through the bare trees, the ramshackle sprawl of their dock where it lolls across the surface of the lake.

The nearest store is 10 miles, and that first mile is a lazy, crunching roll down a long, gravel road. Lee's school is 15 miles away. It made his jaw tense when he first heard that, his temples twinge, before he realized this place has hardly any traffic.

Lionel wasn't ready to be so far apart from things.

He wasn't ready for any of it, really.

* * *

 

When the car rounds the bend, she is waiting for them. She sits on the front step of the house that he still doesn't recognize as his, her boots in the fallen leaves, the dog sitting straight-backed and composed between her knees.

Shaw half-waves only when Lee does.

"I didn't know she was gonna come," Lee says to him as he unbuckles his seatbelt.

"Yeah." Lionel puts the car in park, already shuffling through escape plans, defense plans. Can they run together or is it already too late? Should he send Lee away now, so he doesn't see the worst of it? "Me neither."

They exchange a quick glance and Lee's brow furrows.

He's afraid they'll have to move again, Lionel knows.

"We don't know why she's here yet," he tells Lee. "Don't worry about it. Go say hi to the dog."

When Lee gets out of the car, Bear drops the stoic act and bounds for him, scattering leaves in his wake. Lee catches the brunt of him on his forearms, on his skinny teenager chest. Bear only jumps up when attacking or playing and it makes Lionel's throat go tense, every time.

Bear licks Lee's cheek and Lionel relaxes by a hair.

"You couldn't call?" he yells to Shaw over the slam of the car door.

She stands, brushes forest dirt off her pants. She looks good. Crisp, dark clothes and color in her face. She’s been working. "I've been busy, Lionel."

"Too busy to call?"

Her lip curls, nastily, like she’s about to mock him for giving a damn, when he catches her by the sleeve, leans in close. "My boy only sees you when shit's gone bad," he murmurs by her ear. "You gotta let me warn him."

One dark, smooth eyebrow jumps a small degree. Her head barely moves up-and-down, understanding. She says, softly, "It's not bad, Lionel."

He lets go of her dark coat, steps back a little. "You in trouble?" he asks.

"No more than usual. But I'm leaving the country for a while. Overseas work." she says. "I need somebody to watch Bear."

"You come all the way out here to the middle of nowhere, rile my kid up, for dogsitting?"

She says, "I don't trust anyone else to watch him."

He sticks his fingers in his pockets, chews on that awhile. He watches his son wrestle the furry killing machine. Bear lets Lee knock him over and wiggles in the dirt, showing his belly.

"How long?"

"Don't know. Until it's done. I'll keep in touch."

"Guess it's good for him," Lionel relents. "Boy should have a dog."

"Did you?"

He snorts. "Not in that apartment. Landlord wouldn't let us keep a goddamn dust bunny, much less a whole dog." He shrugs his shoulders against the crisp air. "You?"

"My mom was allergic," she says. "Bear is my first."

Lionel hangs onto things like this, tight-fisted. She doesn't offer details very often. The important things about Shaw, he already knows without her having to tell him. The little things, the things that matter less, he hangs on to the way some parents hang on to baby teeth.

He didn't do that. His wife did, maybe, back when she was still his wife. Lee has all his adult teeth now, has for a couple years, so it's way too late to start.

Kinda creepy, the thought of those rattling around in a box somewhere.

"Dad?" Lee calls and he snaps back to now. "Is it OK if I take Bear out to the dock?"

He takes a sidelong glance at Shaw, a "Do you mind if your dog jumps in the lake 'cause that's what's happening" kind of look. Her eyes light up, just slightly. An opportunity-seizing kind of look. Shaw wants to talk alone. "Yeah, do that," he says.

As Lee rounds the corner of the house, he glances back and Lionel gives him a quick thumbs up from the hip. All clear. Relief washes over Lee's face.

Bear barks and Lee sprints around the bend and out of sight.

"You're worried about him," Shaw says, like "The sky is blue," no feeling apparent, just floating an obvious fact to see where it goes.

He nods slowly. "He misses home. Just getting around to making some new friends out here. He needs time to settle in.  And, uh." He thrusts his fists deeper in his pockets, starts to walk around the other side of the house and down a path he knows will take them to a small, rocky beach where he'll be able to watch if he has to, but where they won't be overheard.

Shaw follows, keeping easy pace, waiting for him to finish.

"...I think about it too much. I'm not working up here, not yet, and I'm still getting the hang of the new place, now we're settled. He's about all I got to think about, day to day." He considers. "I guess it's not so bad. I had a couple years there where he wasn't on my mind as much as he should've been, so maybe this will make up for...for lost time a little bit. But, man, you can only schedule pack lunches and playdates so many weeks in advance before you start to lose it."

"Never thought you'd turn into a soccer mom, Lionel."

"Hockey," he says, "and go fuck yourself."

When he looks at her, they're both grinning, sharp-toothed.

She kicks leaves up with the toe of her boot. She asks, "You want something else to do with all that time?"

His heart thuds, fearful, eager. "I'm listening."

"Nothing big," she says. "Not much action up here. There's a payphone in town, right?" Not an actual question. She already knows. She's just seeing if he bites.

He nods. "At the gas station. I'm not sure it's in service."

"That's OK. It doesn't need to be." They come out onto the shore. It's not the kind of beach you'd want to hang out on, really. Smooth, fist-sized rocks roll and shift under their shoes as they step into the sunlight. "Just keep an eye on it. That's all."

"You expecting a call?"

"No. But you should be. Not that there will be one." She shrugs in response to his raised eyebrow. "You might be retired."

"Nobody asked me."

"I know."

Lionel watches the small, bright shape of his son standing at the edge of the dock, the dark shape of Bear paddling in the water. "I'll keep an eye on the payphone for you."

"Thanks."

"You're a pain in my ass, you know that?"

She flattens out a smile and almost leans against him. The shoulders of their jackets barely scrape. "I try."

They stand quiet, listening to birds and splashes and excitable barks.

"Lionel..." she begins.

He knows the question already. It's the only one they're afraid to ask each other now, the one they avoid and dread because if it never gets asked, it never gets answered, and the answer won't have to be "No" like always.

"...Have you heard from them?"

He closes his eyes for a moment, feels sunlight on his face, soft red through his eyelids. "No," he says. "Neither one of them. You?"

"No."

He breathes deep. "We'd hear from them, right? If they were. They'd get in touch."

She doesn't say.

When they walk back up the path, Lionel asks, "You staying for the night? My couch isn’t exactly the Hilton, but..."

"That a good idea?" she asks. "With your kid?"

"You kidding? He thinks you're a superhero." It's true. Lee remembers her with a kind of fearful reverence. The woman who saved his life and told him to shut up about it. He tiptoes around her.

Shaw's breath hisses between her teeth and he can tell she's weighing options. Her stomach against the clock, maybe. "What's for dinner?"

"Steelhead trout. Friend in town is a fisherman and we've got a lot of fish to work through."

She thinks hard about that. "Pass."

"Fuck you. I'm a good cook."

"No thanks. I've seen your fridge."

"You saw my fridge back when I was a cop. Now I got nothing going on in my life, I'm cooking every night. Protein, vegetables, amino acids. The whole thing."

Her lip curls a little. "Just watch the payphone, Fusco."

"Yeah, yeah." And then, with a painful note of hope in his voice, "You getting any calls?"

She hesitates. He doesn't think Shaw ever had a problem lying before now, but they're the only ones left so they try to be upfront about these things for each other’s sake. The lie she was going to tell clicks against the backs of her teeth.

"Sometimes," she admits.

"I thought that was over with."

"It's not."

"Still helping people?"

"Sometimes."

"Why am I not getting calls?"

"Like I said. You might be retired."

He exhales, bitter. "I’m not ready to hang it up."

"I know," she says. "Watch the payphone, Lionel."

"When you come back for the dog, then," he says. "I'll make you dinner then."

He says this instead of "Come back safe." Shaw knows this. Shaw doesn't like sappy scenes so she nods, appreciating it.

He wants her to know he won't go all mushy if she needs to talk. He thinks she knows. He thinks.

She doesn't want to say goodbye to Lee or the dog ("I hate goodbyes. You know that, Lionel.") so it's just the two of them when she climbs into her car (blue, beaten, Ohio plates, probably stolen but Lionel doesn't ask) and pulls out onto the gravel road. Lionel leans against a tree and doesn't wave, just watches until her dented fender rolls out of sight.

After a while, he goes out back to find Lee sitting on the dock beside Bear, who is soaked and gnawing on a wet branch as thick as Lionel's forearm. His paws are covered in mushy woodchips.

Lee jumps to his feet, shielding his eyes from the setting sun bouncing off the water. He's afraid still. "What's up?"

"Nothing big," Lionel says. "Sameen's gotta travel for a while and she needs us to watch Bear for her."

This is, Lionel can see, the best possible answer to that question. Lee lights up. "How long?"

"She's not sure. We'll see. You up for it?"

Lee's grin is his answer.

After dinner, Lionel sneaks Bear a small piece of fish and scratches his square head and steel-trap jaw, fur still slightly damp and spiky from the lake. "You gonna look after my boy?" he asks.

Bear whines and licks Lionel's fingers for the last trace of steelhead trout.

He cradles Bear's head in his hands.

Watch the payphone.

A job's a job.

* * *

 

When they pull up to the gas station, Lionel pauses, thinks a second. He turns to Lee and immediately catches an earful of Bear's tongue. The dog likes to stick his head and shoulders in between the front seats of their car and stand there, watching out the windshield, like he's in the prow of a ship.

After Lee's finished laughing at him and Fusco's finished wiping furiously at the dog spit on his ear, he asks, "Hey, you know how to fill a gas tank?"

"Kinda?" Lee says. "You put the thing in the thing."

"Sure, basically. Come on, you're gonna start driving next year, you might as well learn."

Lee scrambles out the passenger side. 

Lionel sets him up - hits the cash button, selects the grade, pops the tank open - and lets Lee take it from there. Work to do.

The payphone is around the side of the building, blemished and cragged with graffiti and carvings. Probably nobody's used it in a long time. Probably nobody's had to.

He reaches for the black receiver and holds it to his ear for a second, waiting, fingertip poised over the chunky metal buttons. He hangs up. 

He's not really sure what he's supposed to do.  

Lionel lifts his head and starts in with a hobby he picked up the day Reese took him on the roof of the precinct and told him a thing or two: counting security cameras. There are always more than you think there will be, more than you want there to be. Gas stations usually have at least one, and it usually works, even if it’s a real podunk place like this.

He spots camera, awkwardly leaning out from the side of the building. Lionel moves himself into its path, eyes on the dark spot of the lens. He speaks softly but he makes sure his lips are moving, that they can be read.

“If you have something to say to me,” he says, “you better say it.”

The phone stays dead.

He leaves notice with the acne-scarred kid behind the register while he pays for the gas in cash. He left the pay phone number with a friend, he says, back before he moved, back before he had his current phone. He thinks that friend might try to reach him. If it rings, could this kid pick it up, take a message?

“Dude, I don’t even think that thing works.”

But Lionel slides him a $50 bill and they don’t say anything more about it.

Back in the car, Lee is craning around the passenger seat to scratch Bear’s ears, his shoes reeking of gasoline. 

“You fill it up too high?” Lionel asks him as he puts his seatbelt on.

Lee nods. “Little bit.”

He pulls out slow, eyes on the dead payphone. “We’ll work on it.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Useful and important notes about aliases at the end of the chapter.

Lionel tells himself things in the morning as he brushes his teeth. Not out loud - he’s aware in a peripheral kind of way that Lee is already starting to think Lionel might be crazy. Not in the way that teenagers usually do - “My dad is  _ crazy _ ” - but in the way where your dad has an unregistered gun and a duffel bag stashed for if he needs to skip town and he lives in the woods. That kind of way. Lionel doesn’t blame him, exactly.

He tells himself these things in his head, firmly, over and over. He hears this is how you make something true.

He tells himself,  _ You are Alan Martin. Your son is Peter Martin. You had a wife once, but not anymore. You moved here from Townson, Maryland five months ago.  You owned used car lots, a bunch of used car lots. You made money, a bunch of money. You’re retired now - early retirement, you’re allowed to say that and you’re allowed to say it smugly - and the first thing you did was buy this house. You just want to spend time raising your son. He’s what’s important now. _

The last thing is true, and he hopes it will make his brain take to the rest. Like an organ transplant.

But the story is imperfect, he knows. Townson, Maryland isn’t a real place, but it is what’s on his driver’s license, so he’s stuck with it. It looks and sounds a lot like  _ Towson _ , Maryland, a college town about a half an hour outside of Baltimore, so if he’s called upon to talk about home, he talks about Towson. What he’s managed to learn from the internet, anyway. He speaks with authority on streets he’s only ever walked through Google Street View.

He struggles to call Lee “Peter”. It feels wrong. 

He tries to keep the matter of his imaginary wife - dead or divorced or simply living apart? - open ended until he can come to a conclusion about his real ex-wife.

Things like that keep the story from being a perfect, digestible thing.

But it’s good enough for right now. People, he knows, don’t look as hard at other people as they like to think.

Lee, who Lionel must brace himself to call Peter when he says goodbye to him outside of school, takes his place in the bathroom. He wonders if Lee tells himself things at the mirror also.

* * *

 

He takes up smoking again, mainly as an excuse. Of all the things he’s quit, he feels safest coming back to this. He dropped smoking mostly on his own, around the time the city started cracking down on smoking in bars and restaurants, and then completely when he found out they were having Lee. He and his wife quit together, chewing gum and confessing indiscretions. He remembers sitting up in the night, cold sweat, nerves itching, ready to creep outside and sneak one under the fire escape when her icy hand gripped his wrist. Her hissing to him in the dark, “If I don't get to walk away from this, neither do you.”

So yeah, he quit. 

He probably wouldn’t go back to it except hanging around a gas station pay phone for no reason at all hours is the kind of thing a habitual smoker might do. Maybe someone who doesn't want to smoke in front of his kid, doesn't want to stink up his car. Somebody who just needs a minute.

It's a reason to be there, by the phone. It’s a reason to linger in front of the security camera. A reason to lean there, to stare, to get real familiar with every piece of minor graffiti on that pay phone: A + J in a heart carved deep into the plastic, a sharpied-on cock, a series of phone numbers Lionel bets are real scummy.

It’s a reason to wait.

But he’s coming to appreciate his smoke breaks for what they are, too. He doesn’t want to do this in front of Lee and standing here all alone, waiting for a phone call from an artificial intelligence, puts him in a remembering mood. Mostly he tries not to do that. Safer this way, if he forgets all the things he isn’t supposed to know. If he hunkers down into fatherhood and digs into community and makes himself more and more a part of this until he is just Alan Martin, father of Peter Martin, formerly of the nonexistant town of Townson, Maryland, and everything about him that might have been suspicious or remarkable is turned a warm and dependable gray.

But he misses them so much it makes him sick sometimes, and not thinking about it can only help so much. So when he’s on smoke break, while he’s waiting, he lets himself slip back to places he wouldn’t, ordinarily. Finch beside him on a couch in a hotel room Lionel could never afford, beaming gently because Lionel trusts him. In a basement with Root, helping her build something crazy, always on his toes, always a little afraid, but still fond because she’s sweet in her way, because her smugness hides lonesomeness. Across the desk from Carter, watching her with her head bent, with her mouth twisted in thought, and realizing suddenly that he’s never had a better friend. John telling him to try not to die and Lionel telling him he loves him back and John’s hand tight on his shoulder and John’s shoulder under his hand.

Lionel has to try hardest to forget John. He supposes John was too many things to him, enemy and idol and partner, and it makes him hard to wash out of his thoughts. John’s a savage ache with him, but it comes so often and so unexpectedly sometimes that the pain of not knowing where he is or what happened to him becomes familiar, friendly.

He goes back to places with Shaw too, even though he shouldn’t have to. She’s still with him, after all. Still provably alive. He can reach for her, if he needs to. But often he’ll stop himself, even if he does need to, because he knows that if he does it too much, Sameen will start to recoil. She’ll be repulsed by him, all raw and needy and sad in a way she can’t be, and she’ll turn away. It’ll be the end of her phone calls, those brief, blunted midnight chats about less than nothing. The ones where she just seems to want to make sure he’s still breathing. A hand gripping his wrist in the dark. He likes to slip back to before it was like this, before their friendship had stakes and they were all each other had.

So he smokes and he remembers and the gas station pay phone stays cold and silent. And he comes to hate it a little, because even though he never really knew it, even though it was just some immense, unthinkable truth John whispered in his ear on the roof of the precinct that day, even though it’s abandoning him, he’s even growing to miss the Machine.

* * *

 

He wakes up and the lake is steaming.

He rolls, flinching from consciousness, a bad taste in his mouth. His sleep last night was humming, restless. It was so cold and there was something screaming in the woods all night, some animal or something.

The cabin, he's noticed, is getting colder day by day, which means Lionel probably has to figure out the wood stove sometime soon. For now, an extra blanket does the trick and he curls there, under his layers, not wanting to move.

He cramps in the cold, these days.

Finally, he makes himself get out of bed and limps, stretching and creaking, out to the kitchen. The cabin's still dark, all the way up to its eaves. He stands in the thread of pale, weak sun drifting in the skylight while coffee percolates, trying to warm himself.

He's still not sure what to make of this place. Wouldn't have picked it for himself, that's for damn sure. When he made a break for it, he was thinking a new city. Suburbs, maybe. Someplace you can blend in. He was not thinking middle of nowhere. But this address was the one in his escape plan and the documents waiting on the table when he got here had it all in the name of Alan Martin. So it's his. Kinda.

Whoever lived here before didn't exactly move out, so it's their furniture in the house, their dirty, spiderwebbed canoes and kayaks in the low, stumpy boathouse by the dock. Their photographs framed and left around the place, showing this grinning Vineyard Vines-looking family: Dad, Mom, Son who is scruffy and teenaged in the photos that seem most recent. Lionel boxed up all the pictures and put them in the loft. They make him feel like an intruder.  

He goes out to the deck to drink his coffee, jacket over pajamas and thick slippers on his feet, because it seems like the kind of thing people in movies or boner pill ads do. You know, happy motherfuckers. The people in the photographs. Those are the kind of people who stand out on their deck with a cup of coffee and watch the sun rise over the lake. 

What he sees is kind of unreal, kind of eerie. The lake is flat, like glass, without so much as a ripple breaking the surface and there's sheets of fog rolling off it. Big, white ghosts pouring off the surface of the lake and breaking, tangling in the pines.

He hears the creak of Lee’s footsteps coming down the stairs to the loft, the click of Bear's nails following after. Lionel turns to see him, his son in fleecy pajama pants and a hoodie worn soft, with his palm resting on the head of the killing machine dog beside him for reassurance, and for a second he’s almost knocked down by shame. Shame that he did this, that he dragged his son out here. That a 14-year-old boy is answering to a false name in this lonely, cold place.

Lee steps out beside Lionel, bare toes curling on the cold planks of their deck. His eyes are on the drifting fog. "Wow," he says after a moment.

"Yeah." Lionel reaches out and catches Lee by the shoulder, pulls him tight against his side. "I dunno," he says. "Where are we, buddy?"

The sun doesn't rise. The sky is smooth, flat, gray.

* * *

 

He's been putting down roots in town carefully, piece by piece.

No job, no coworkers, which is an obstacle. His new ID doesn't have a cop's background and it’s too late to start all over again. What’s left for him is private security type stuff. Not much call for that up here. Not that he needs to work these days, but it'd be nice to have anything to do. 

Outside of work, he used to box, but there’s not much of that around here either.  There’s hiking, which his bad knees don’t appreciate, rock climbing, which is like a joke, and skiing, which is a snowier, colder joke. They say swimming's a good sport for fat guys with troubled joints, but Lionel never learned to swim. There's a small gym in town, though - grimy mats, mismatched weights, and underserviced machines - and he makes inroads there with rough-edged, friendly sports talk. This is how he meets Doug - late 40's, soft gut, willing to hold a punching bag while Lionel beats the shit out of it and show Lionel how to ice fish, which is probably the only new sport he's up to trying these days.

No dog parks out here 'cause there's so much damn space, but he finds easy hiking spots and he lets Bear tear around there. That's how you meet dog people, he finds, and dog people are about as eager to talk as he is. They ask what kind of dog Bear is - Belgian Malinois, ineptly pronounced, or German Shepherd if it's easier to lie. He keeps the Dutch to a minimum and if anybody asks, he lets his face go soft and solemn and he says "Well, he was a rescue..." and that usually distracts them. This is how he meets Carol - graying blonde, nurse, always looking for a dog her Newfoundland can play with without crushing, and Bear seems to have a good time so Lionel never feels too bad exploiting him.

He has his best luck tagging after Lee. The usual stay-at-home, pick-up-from-school, minivans-and-orange-slices types are mostly moms, which he figured, but they appreciate that he's raising a kid on his own, so they allow him in the circle. And Lee's a bright kid, an active kid, and you can make a lot of friends just by being there, just by showing up to every peewee hockey game, just by shooting the shit on the bleachers. This is how he meets most of them - couples, other single parents, the kinds of people who hold parties where everybody brings a dish and they all watch a hockey game while the kids play in the finished basement. The kind of people with standing weekly poker games, who go out to the bar in packs and don't give him too much shit about not drinking, and it's such a relief having people to sit next to, people to laugh with and pass time with.

Except sometimes he chokes on it. Sometimes somebody will touch his shoulder just so, somebody will say something a little dry, but not as dry as Glasses would have said it. And he’ll realize what kind of hole he’s trying to fill, what wound he’s trying to stuff.

He doesn’t want to admit that his friends are dead.

They aren’t, not all of them. Shaw is out there somewhere, stiff and close-mouthed, but there for him in her way. There are friends from the old days, back in the city, but they all think he’s crooked or worse. And there’s Reese and Finch, Schroedinger’s Friends. Dead and not dead, all at once.

Morbid to think about as he sips his tonic water and leans into pub trivia, he knows. It’s only that he can’t talk to these people, not really. 

* * *

 

“Alan,” somebody says, and it takes Lionel just a second too long to remember that that’s supposed to be him.

“Alan,” they say again. “You oughta come hunting sometime.”

Lionel doesn’t lift his forehead from the fogging car window. He just lets his eyebrows lift, his gaze drift sidelong until he’s looking at Glen, who has wrenched himself halfway around in the passenger seat and is looking back at Lionel, hat askew, waiting for an answer.

Lionel hasn’t decided if fishing was a bad idea or not.

There’s three of them in Dan’s hefty, boxy SUV. Four if you count Bear, wedged in between Fusco’s shins and the back of the driver’s seat, tuckered out and filling the car with the smell of wet dog. Many more if you count the fish - fat, slippery bass sloshing against each other in a Coleman cooler in the way back. 

It’s not that Lionel minds playing ignorant city boy for the fathers of his son’s friends. That’s a game he’s been playing all his life, in one way or another. Being the guy who’s slow to learn, the guy who loses gracefully, the guy who takes direction. It’s a way to make people warm to him a little. Let them think they’re helping him out. And Lionel needs that warmth, just a little of it, just enough that he’s not an outsider anymore. So he’ll wince his way through threading a worm on a hook, tangle his line, recoil when a fish flops heavy in the bottom of their boat if it makes them smile, if it makes them feel good to help the new guy out. 

He’s just surprised to find he doesn’t enjoy it anymore. Not even a little bit.

“There’s deer. Wild turkey. Fishers. You can make some real money off of those,” Glen continues, encouraging. “Black bear, if you’re brave.”

Lionel curls his fingers inside his gloves, feels his knuckles cold and chafed from work and fish scales. “Nice of you, man. But I dunno if I’m up to it yet.”

“We can teach you to shoot,” says Dan, not turning his head, eyes on the road. “If that’s the problem.”

Glen sucks his teeth, makes a knowing sound. “That’s right,” he says. “You wouldn’t have had much cause to fire a gun in the city.”

It’s true that Lionel’s never touched a hunting rifle. There might be a learning curve there. But he got pretty good at figuring out whatever gun he was given towards the end, so he thinks he’d probably be good at it. He doesn’t know, though. He’s never shot at something alive for fun.

It’d be a smart move, he thinks. Not just to worm his way in deeper with these people, although that’s important too; he’s been driving one, two hours out of his way to exercise the handgun registered to his new self at a range where he won’t be recognized, just to get away from questions. If he let somebody teach him, he could go to the range the next town over where all these guys go. He could say “Fast learner,” if anybody asked.

“You know, I’ll think about that,” Lionel says, cracking a smile. “Thanks.”

“Besides,” Glen says as he turns around, “you can’t possibly shoot worse than you fish.”

They share a chuckle at that and Bear lifts his head, alarmed. Lionel takes Bear’s head in his hands, ruffles him quiet.  _ Don’t worry about it, guy. Just making friends. _

When they pull in at the gas station, Lionel lets Bear out to stretch his legs. He thinks life on the road with Shaw has Bear cooped up a little, and now that he’s in all these wide open spaces, he can’t get enough. He trots wide circles around their car, and Lionel tells him “Hier” if he starts to drift too far, ‘cause it sounds enough like English that nobody will ask questions. 

Out of habit, he takes his place by the pay phone, fishes in his pocket for the pack of cigarettes. It’s a slow, sneaky smoke-a-day habit, so he’s managed to make this pack last a long time. It’s getting empty, squashy, though, so Lionel thinks maybe it’s time to think about getting a new pack. That or quit again, ‘cause if the phone stays silent and the remembering hurts and he knows Lee can smell the smoke on his clothes, then what’s the point of any of this?

Lionel struggles with a shitty plastic Zippo, bites down on the loose middle finger of his glove to free his hand. The biting cold on his raw knuckles, the heat from the brief and small flame is a comfort, familiar.

He lets himself slip way back this time, back when he was still smoking regular. Times he feels guilty feeling nostalgic about. This was a little after he made detective, when he and Stills would go for drinks after work or sneak cigarettes around the back of the precinct to celebrate solved cases. If he closes his eyes, he can feel Stills beside him, the warmth of him, the crinkle of his leather jacket against Lionel’s shoulder where they’d press together against the cold…

Guilt knifes at his ribs. Missing Stills is always a difficult, ugly thing. He should never have loved Stills for so long, should never have hurt anybody to protect him. But he did love Stills. He did bury Stills. It would be wrong to pretend it never happened, that those wounds aren’t still there.

His thoughts drift to a different cold day, to snow kissing the back of his neck, dirt freezing his fingers, the collar of Stills’ leather jacket pressing into Lionel’s face as he weeps against Stills’ cold chest and Lionel doesn’t want to be there, not in front of these fathers of his son’s friends who are watching him curiously as they fill the empty, sucking gas tank of Dan’s Hummer. He can’t be there.

He takes a drag, shuts his eyes, remembers a less ugly moment. Still cold, though. He remembers John, how he was pretending not to be afraid for him, how he wasn’t sure what he’d find out there in the mountains. He remembers John curled in the driver’s side seat of a dead car, fish-white and bleeding, the way his eyelids flickered. He remembers John draped against his shoulder, dragging his feet in the snow, and how the trail he left was hot and flashy and blindingly red. He remembers dropping John into the passenger seat of his own car and turning the heat on full blast and driving as fast as he dared, siren blaring, and he remembers a moment when he couldn’t hear John breathing and he was sure,  _ sure  _ that he was gone and he’d reached for John’s pale throat to feel for a pulse he  _ knew  _ wouldn’t be there. But it was there. It was there and John murmured, nuzzled his cheek against Lionel’s palm, and the wave of white-hot, protective feeling almost made his throat close.

The phone rings. His fingers jump and the cigarette slips from his hand. 

It rings again and he stands there for a long, painful second, staring at it numb and stupid. When the spell breaks, his hands are clumsy, frantic, and for a second he’s sure he rattled it in the receiver, that he accidentally hung up on God. But when he brings it to his ear there’s no dial tone. There’s just hush, just waiting.

“Uh,” he says. “Hello?”

All of a sudden, Lionel feels very stupid. It’s going to be a wrong number. It’s going to be someone calling for a friend whose number they don’t have, like in the lie Fusco told the gas station attendant. It’s not going to be somebody calling up to give Fusco a purpose again.

And even if it is, even if Robot God herself has dropped him a line just to give him a job to do, why does he need it so bad? Why isn’t his son and a safe house and a quiet life enough?

He presses the receiver into his cheek, grinds the smoldering cigarette under his boot. He waits for instructions.

The voice is the one that makes him doubt what he saw all those months ago in the morgue, the one that makes his skin crawl. Even after Shaw explained it to him, it still freaks him the hell out. He understands those poor schlubs in zombie movies who can’t seem to outrun a dead thing moving at a snail’s pace.

He knows now that he wouldn’t be able to move a muscle.

Root’s voice says to him, “Lionel. Thank you for waiting.”

He exhales, shudders, wordless.

“I know it hasn’t been easy for you, having nothing to do all this time. But you can’t pick up and drop new identities at the drop of a hat the way Root could. Not with your son. So I wanted to make sure this identity stuck, before you went back to work. I hope you understand that.”

He nods.

“I’m glad,” she says. It says.  _ Should be “she” out loud, so you don’t offend her. Shouldn’t offend her, because she just saw you nod. _ “I’m going to throw you a softball to start with. Are you ready, Lionel?”

Finally, he finds his voice. “I am.”

“Good.” She pauses for a moment, where a person might have taken a breath. “His name is Samuel Gagnon. He lives in Hooksett. Do you know it?”

He does. Not well. He’s driven through it. It’s one of those transitory places, a significant exit that you pass through on the way to something else. You stop for gas and coffee there. He can’t really imagine living there, although he knows people must.

“Hey, Alan!” calls Glen, waving from around the SUV. “We’re going.”

Lionel leans hard on the phone booth, shielding his head, pressing into the voice.

“You’ll need your gun. The unregistered one,” she clarifies unnecessarily. “And you’ll need a headset, so you and I can talk. And you’ll need to find a place for Lee to stay while you’re away.”

“How long?”

“A few days,” she says, “if all goes well.”

_ If you don’t die _ , she doesn’t say. But she doesn’t have to. They both know that’s on the table.

Like a mind-reader on top of everything else, she says, “If you’re having second thoughts, I understand completely. More than ever, you have Lee to think of. That must weigh on you.”

It does. It really does. Before he always has an answer to that question,  _ what happens to Lee if you drop dead? _ Not good answers, but answers. Now it’s just a big, awful question mark.

He takes a deep breath. “Is it important?” he asks. “This thing? Is it really important?”

“Lionel,” she says, “it’s  _ always  _ important.”

“Alan!” Glen calls again. “What the hell’s taking so long?”

Lionel covers the receiver, cups his mouth to God’s ear. “I think I can leave by tonight.”

He hears a smile in its voice and it chills him, not because it sounds fake but because it sounds _ so real _ . “It’s only an hour away, Lionel. Leave in the morning.”

He trudges back to the car, Bear at his heels, hands in his pockets, thinking furiously.

“Who were you talking to?” Glen asks.

“Old friend,” Lionel says as he pulls himself into the car, as Bear jumps hard in his lap. “Listen, can one of you take my kid for a couple of days?”

He’s met with quizzical stares and Lionel realizes that when people without jobs, people who aren’t homicide cops working graveyard shifts pull this kind of thing, it’s weird.

He looks down at his hands, knots them together nervously. “My friend is in kind of a rough patch. Needs, uh, needs support. I don’t know what to say, just that it’s an emergency or I wouldn’t ask…”

“Hey,” Dan says, holding up one hand. “Say no more. We’d be happy to have Peter.”

_ “Who?” _ Lionel stops himself from saying. “Thank you,” he says, mouth warming into an anxious smile, voice quavering just a little. “I know it’s short notice and I hate to dump Pete on people like that. It’s just that I’m kinda on my own with him and…” His voice breaks, soft. More of a bend.

Dan’s eyes crinkle in the rearview mirror. “Calm down with the mushy stuff, Alan. He’ll be safe with us.”

Lionel leans back. “Thank you,” he says again. He lets his face relax. He hates lying to these people and he hasn’t had to play emotional for a while. It’s not all fake; he doesn’t like leaving Lee alone. But he’s glad it worked on Dan. He doesn’t completely trust any of them yet but Dan, who is sturdy and graying, who people call Dan the Lawman, who is the Sheriff in this two-and-a-half stoplight town, is probably the safest of them.

Lionel leans back and starts inventorying, making lists. His gun, his cash, his fake ID, snacks for the car in case he’s got a stakeout ahead of him, gotta buy a wireless headset, gotta pack a bag for Lee, of course. His hands are trembling, weak with adrenaline, and he buries them in Bear’s fur.

He has a job. For the first time in five months he has something to do and the spike of excitement this sends through him makes him too happy to be guilty.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just wanted to quickly explain "Alan and Peter Martin from Townson, Maryland" and why their cover is the way it is. Basically the foundation of this AU is that Fusco and Lee used Root's escape plan post-canon for reasons I have chosen to not explain yet. When I started work on this chapter, I decided that before I went any further, I should see if I could get any clues from that scene in QSO where Root gives Fusco the fake IDs. I looked through some screencaps, and I found this: http://screencapped.net/tv/personofinterest/displayimage.php?album=97&pid=262668#top_display_media
> 
> This is a) exactly what I was looking for and b) a MASSIVE PAIN IN THE ASS, because I was kind of hoping they would just have a new surname in the grand POI tradition of using your actual first name while undercover. However, I've decided to roll with it and now I have to remember to have the townsfolk refer to Lionel and Lee as Alan and Peter respectively. Probably Lionel will accidentally call Lee Lee instead of Peter a bunch and also Lee will get to deal with the trauma of having to go by a false name at age 14 because of his dad's questionable life choices, so that should be fun for everyone.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> happy new year, friends

Under the bed in his room, there are two duffel bags. Inside one: copies of their current IDs, a sealed envelope with their backup IDs, around $10,000 in cash, a First Aid kit, a change of clothes, and Lionel's backup gun, the one he exercises at a nearby range every so often so it doesn't get stiff or lazy. Inside the other: a change of clothes, some backup cash, and a box of granola bars that won't perish for a year. In the past couple of weeks, they added a couple day's worth of meals for Bear in Ziploc baggies that they painstakingly replace every couple of months.

Lee knows the bags are there. He needs to.

Lionel pulls the bigger bag - his bag - out and unzips it on his bed. He takes out the copies of the current IDs, shoves in a few more changes of clothes, his phone charger, socks and underwear, hiking boots in case there’s walking to do. He pulls out the smaller bag - Lee’s bag - and sticks the IDs in there.

“You won’t need the IDs,” he tells Lee as he transfers the baggies of dog food into his own duffel, “but they’re safer with you than with me.”

“Why?” Lee asks. He’s filling up his hockey bag, supplementing his gear with enough changes of clothes for two or three days of practice.

“Because I don’t want anybody knowing who I am.” 

“That’s  _ not  _ who you are.”

“Yeah, but. You know.”

“I know,” says Lee. He doesn’t, but he knows that if this fake life is compromised, they’ll have to move on to a new one. He knows that it will be dangerous and that he’ll have to say goodbye to the friends he’s made so far. That’s enough to make him defend being Peter Martin. 

“It’s only for a few days,” Lionel says. “No big deal.”

“Is it dangerous?”

Lionel considers lying, pushes that instinct aside. Lee is his partner in this. There’s nothing safe about keeping him in the dark. “Yeah,” he says. “Probably. But it’ll help somebody who’s in trouble. Or stop somebody who wants to hurt other people.”

Lee nods thoughtfully, sits down on his hockey bag. He’s been used to this conversation ever since he was five and realized that Dad being a police detective meant that Dad might get hurt. But Lionel can see that the shakiness of this, the absence of the badge, makes it all a little more flexible and unsteady. 

Lionel sinks into a crouch in front of him, winces at the strain on his knees, and takes Lee’s hands in his. “I did stuff like this before, when I was a cop,” Lionel reminds him. “And that was real stuff. Organized crime, hired killers, big league stuff like that. This will be different. Small-time. Doesn’t mean I’m not gonna be careful,” he says. “‘Cause I’m always careful. But I’m not worried. And you shouldn’t be either.”

Lee’s eyes are on his sneakers. He squeezes back, weakly.

“It’s gonna be fine,” Lionel says. “You’re gonna hang out with your friend, stay up late, eat junk food, the whole bit. You’re not gonna want me back.”

Lee grins a little, shyly. “I mean, I might.”

“Nah.”

“I’ll miss Bear, anyway.”

“Oh, of course, you’ll miss that smelly animal and not-”

Lee catches him around the neck and hangs on tight. Lionel stills, quiets, squeezes him back.

“See you soon, Dad.”

Lionel tucks his face into his kid’s shoulder. “Love you, bud.”

“See you  _ soon _ ,” Lee repeats, pointedly.

“Yeah.” He detaches, looks Lee square in the eye, grips him firmly by the shoulders. “See you soon.”

 

* * *

 

He makes the drive down to Hooksett that very night, in the pitch dark, winding along highways carved into the sides of mountains and fringed with jagged cliffsides. The light from his headlights, from the tail lights of a truck a good distance ahead of him, from the fat yellow moon in the sky, is all the light there seems to be in the world. 

If he’d waited until morning, there would have been a bright, clean, icy blue sky and mountains capped at their very tips in white and leaves turning flame orange at the edges in the way that tourists travel for hundreds of miles to see. It would’ve been a beautiful drive.

But he’s got this sickly excited adrenaline rush crackling through him and he couldn’t stand to sleep.

Lionel is nearly there when she starts speaking to him again. 

“You should rest soon,” she says, softly, out of nowhere.

The steering wheel leaps in his hands and the car swerves for just a second before he rights it, heart pounding. “Jesus Christ,” he murmurs, touching the earpiece. “Warn a guy.”

“I  _ am _ warning you, Lionel. You need to stop. There’s a package for you.”

“A package?”

“To help you,” she says. “You’ll want this.”

“Alright.” He swipes his hand over his mouth. “I’ll take your word for it. Where to?”

“The rest stop. Just ahead.”

On cue, he sees the angry, bright white glow of the floodlights in the rest stop parking lot radiating just beyond the curve.

The rest stop is a Frankenstein kinda thing, gas station and diner and coffee shop and liquor store all stitched together and looming just off the edge of the highway. The lot is sparsely populated, but busier than anyplace else he’s seen since he left home. He parks.

Jostled awake by the sudden stop, Bear peers between the two front seats, alert. Fusco scratches the base of his ears. “Good boy,” he murmurs.  And then, “Lead the way, boss.”

“Go inside, Lionel.”

He pats the dog, cracks the windows. It’s a cool night anyway.

Inside is kinda what he expected: a too-big, too-disorientingly cobbled together space filled with too few people, all of them skittish and tired and washed out from fluorescence, all wishing they were home right now, all nursing Styrofoam cups of bad vending machine coffee. Lionel kinda envies them the coffee, but otherwise he relates.

“Liquor store,” says the voice in his ear.

His heart sinks a little.

Knowing he can’t drink anymore is a tough thing, something he keeps firmly in the back of his mind because if he thinks the words directly - “No drinking _ ever again _ .” - it fills him with a kind of sickly panic. What he usually says to himself is “No drinking  _ right now _ ,” and if he says it to himself all the time, every time he thinks he might have a beer for old time’s sake, he can keep on putting it off. And he’s getting pretty good at putting it off. In New York, if he was in a bar, he was working. Up here, he’s gotta stay sober for the drive home. Lionel knows all the reasons not to drink at a bar.

Liquor stores are tough, though. They’re about buying something for later, for a more appropriate time. And Lionel has so much free time now.

His palms sweat a little and he knots his hands up into fists.

The store is barely open, empty save for a drawn old man at the register. Lionel’s fine with that. It feels a little easier with nobody to look at him. Something about using the earpiece, the secrecy of it, gives him the jitters and he’s not sure how hard he should be working at not being noticed.

“The whiskey aisle, Lionel,” says the voice in his ear, and he flinches. “By the Jack Daniels.”

“Jesus,” he whispers, but he knows where he’s going, stalking past row after row of neat glass bottles until he sees what he’s looking for. “What are you, thirsty?”

“Behind the bottles,” she says, ignoring him.

He kneels in the aisle, nose to nose with Jack Daniels, and starts taking bottles off the shelf, one by one. “I’m a little old to get brought in for shoplifting,” he murmurs to her, “don’t you think?”

She says, “You are not stealing.”

Three bottles deep into the shelf, he sees the end of a black strap, a plastic buckle, crumpled up between the rows. Part of a backpack. He takes a bottle in each hand and starts clearing the shelf. He winces every time a glass bottle clinks against the linoleum floor. 

“Looks a little suspicious, doesn’t it? What if the old timer at the front has a problem with me tearing up his shelf?”

“He can’t see you.”

“It’s a liquor store. They got cameras everywhere.”

“The cameras are malfunctioning. Just be quiet, Lionel.”

He unearths the backpack from the shelf and slings it over one shoulder as quickly as he can, takes a few seconds to stack the bottles back where he found them, make sure at least the ones in the front are facing the right way, that they look straight and even. He stands.

He tells himself that it’d make things look less suspicious if he bought a bottle, just for show. He wouldn’t have to drink it. He could give it away to a friend.

He leaves with nothing in his hands. Lionel knows himself too well.

“Anything else?” he asks.

“No,” she says. “We can move on now, Lionel.”

He doesn’t even stop to get coffee. He’s halfway across the parking lot when he says, “Do me a favor.”

“I’ll do what I can.”

“Next time you want me to pick something up, don’t hide it in a place like that. In a garbage can, a toilet tank, whatever, I’ll put up with it. No more liquor stores. No bars. OK?”

“I had no concerns about your ability to resist temptation.”

“How nice for you,” he says as he yanks the car door open. “I did.”

The Machine considers, breathless, thoughtful. “Are you going to open the bag?”

Sitting in the driver’s seat with Bear snuffling a greeting into his ear, Fusco unzips the bag. It’s a small, crumpled up backpack, polyester and thin, like maybe something you’d get as a freebie from some company. There’s a logo embroidered on the zip-up pocket, a white letter T embedded in a square, the words “Thornhill Utilities” stitched beside it. He takes a peek inside.

“Huh.” 

“Everything alright, Lionel?”

“We’re gonna be doing a lot of sneaking around today, huh?”

“Will that be a problem?”

“Nah.” He rolls his shoulders. “Gotta get back into it, I guess. It’s like riding a bike, right?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Yeah,” he says as he stuffs the backpack under the passenger seat, “I guess not.”

 

* * *

 

The point is, by the time he reaches Hooksett, it’s still dark and quiet, which means he has time to stake out the house while everybody inside is still asleep.

“Everybody” is just Sam Gagnon and his wife, Roberta. No kids, no pets, an orderly lawn. From hastily done Facebook research, he knows Roberta gardens for a hobby. And works. Work is unclear, some finance something up in Manchester. Lots of conversations with friends, lots of events, lots of pictures of her holding glasses of wine with coworkers in badly lit, nicely appointed rooms. She’s well-scheduled and public. 

Sam’s a little tougher to get a handle on. Lionel has a pretty good idea of who he was before six months ago. His Facebook page looked a lot like his wife’s: active, happy, success after success. And then it all went quiet, sullen. No place of work listed. Sparse updates, birthday wishes from a few months back. Nothing after that. Fired, maybe. Or unable to work: sickness, accident, head trouble. Something like that. Whatever happened, the guy doesn’t seem to get out much anymore. Or if he does, he doesn’t talk about it on the internet. Smart of him.

For an instant, lying on his stomach in the undergrowth, peering through binoculars and scanning the windows for lights or signs of movement, he desperately misses being a cop back in New York. He misses easily blending into crowds, sitting right by a perp without him even noticing because there’s just so many people that they all become a comforting blur. He misses having that badge, a reason to be there. He misses having a database to type all this shit into and have it come out making sense. Research through Facebook, Jesus Christ. 

He pops the collar of his coat up around his ears and leans gently against Bear, who’s lying beside him on the bed of dead leaves. The dog is warm against his side.

It’s not the worst plan in the world and because Lionel came up with it on his own and the Machine didn’t veto it, he feels pretty fucking proud. See, the thing with the Gagnons is, they live in the middle of goddamn nowhere. Not quite as in the middle of goddamn nowhere as Lionel does, but close enough that their house is way back in the woods, at the end of one of a series of winding driveways splitting off from a dead end road. Close enough that they can’t see their neighbors through the trees. Close enough that there’s a nature path running through the woods, less than twenty feet away from the edge of their backyard.

See, Lionel may not have partners anymore and he may not have resources anymore and he may not have any kind of backup, but he does have this dog and he’s got brains enough to come up with an excuse to be basically anywhere.

Me? Spying on you? Nah, I’m just birdwatching. With my dog. Who needs a badge?

He refocuses his binoculars. No movement, no nothing. There’s a light on the back porch he doesn’t like, thinks it might be motion activated. There’s a camera too, which is suspicious in its own way. Who’s that paranoid out here? But he figures it’s for animals or break ins, so if nothing’s amiss in the morning and if he doesn’t do anything stupid, there won’t be any reason to check the camera. “What do you think?” he asks.

“You should go,” she says. “They’ll be waking up soon.”

He pulls the backpack onto his shoulder. “Anything I should be worried about?”

“Many things. But nothing we can’t handle. Just don’t get caught, Lionel.”

He rises, brushes shreds of dry leaves from the front of his jeans. “Thank you so much.” 

He tells Bear to stay.

He creeps across the lawn at a slow stroll, heart thumping. He tugs the brim of his ball cap low over his face, like that’ll do anything. The camera’s right there, right above the porch he’s approaching. It’ll either catch him or it won’t.

“I’m looping the footage of the last half hour,” she says. “It’s been an uneventful night.”

His shoulders drop, relax. “Now you tell me,” he whispers, half laughing.

“It’ll be alright, Lionel. I’m looking out for you. Just listen carefully.”

“Right.” He takes a deep breath. He can do this. He did this for years. Just pretend it’s Finch on the other end of the line, bossing him. Or Root, since the voice is the same.

“Do you need me to tell you how to break in?” she asks.

Maybe not Root. Much as he misses her, he could never quite shake the feeling that she was going to fuck him over at any second.

Lionel slips on leather gloves as he approaches the sliding door. “No thanks,” he says. “This isn’t fucking amateur hour.”

Because over the years, Lionel has learned a thing or two about how to break into a house and on the grand scale of break-in difficulty, sliding doors rate just barely above unlocked doors. He takes the door by the handle and gently eases it up one, two, three times until the latch slips from the bracket. The door slides open easy as pie and totally silent. He stands in the threshold for a second, listening for the sounds of somebody waking up, feeling warm, clean-smelling house air mixing with the dewy, cool outside.

Quiet.

She says, “You have exactly 17 seconds to turn off the security system. It’s on your right. Would you like to know the code?”

He lunges inside, frantic until he sees the little gray plastic keypad mounted on the glass. “Oh, get fucked,” he whispers.

She tells him.

After that, he has to stand there for a few seconds in the dark, trying to slow his breath.

“Done?” she asks.

He nods, swallows, waits for the sound of his own blood rushing and pumping to leave his ears. As panic fades, reality starts to creep in, bit by bit. There’s a low hum - the heating system, maybe. The hardwood floor under his feet is shiny, spotless. Somewhere in the house, a clock is ticking. Lionel exhales. He slides the door nearly closed, just before the latch catches, enough to shut out the night sounds. He bends to take off his shoes and slides them into his Thornhill Utilities backpack as quietly as he can.

He moves through the dining room silently in his socks. The floorboards don’t creak. That’s good. 

The bugs in the bag are all individually packaged in tiny ziploc bags so he won’t get them mixed up. Idiotproof. He’d be insulted if it wasn’t so damn convenient. There’s even a little bit of adhesive so he can attach the little microphone to the bottom of the fruit bowl in the center of the dining room table, where it can’t be seen. 

With the first bug placed, he takes a deep breath. It’s all going to be really easy, he tells himself. The rest is just a matter of moving quietly, which isn’t his strong suit, but he’s better at it than he looks. Christ, he’d almost have to be. He keeps going.

The next microphone goes inside a vase near the front door. It’s empty, the inside dry and thick with dust. They might never find this one. He puts another in some kind of hollow ceramic cat sitting in a place of honor in the TV room. One behind the microwave in the kitchen. One on the underside of the medicine cabinet in the downstairs bathroom.

There’s no pictures, he notices. Not anywhere in the house. Not so much as a vacation snapshot, a wedding photo, school pictures of nieces and nephews. That’s a little weird, he thinks. Not investigation weird, but weird.

As a coup de grace, he slips through the inside door into their orderly two-car garage and attaches a tracker under each of their fenders. He rises from his hands and knees to see a fucking menagerie of guns, neatly mounted on a pegboard on one wall. Everything from handguns to long, eerie things with scopes. Someone in this house is downright romantic about their guns.

“Jesus Christ,” Lionel whispers, dry-mouthed.

“You’re doing very well,” she says. “Time to go now, Lionel.”

He backs out of the garage real slow.

“Lionel,” the Machine murmurs as his heart hammers in his chest, as his eyes start to stray toward the back door and freedom. “We need sound upstairs too.”

He exhales, soft agreement, nods even though he’s sure she can’t see him. He was afraid of that. But guns aside, he’s feeling looser, a little more confident. This house has an insulated, well-oiled quiet to it and it’s making him too brave. Better stay scared, just a little bit. Scared enough to be careful.

Lionel climbs the stairs in his thick hiking socks, waiting for the step that creaks. But there isn’t one.

He thinks, “Maybe there’s nothing to be scared of,” and then he tells himself to go fuck himself, ‘cause that’s the kind of attitude that’s going to get him killed.

But it’s silent upstairs. No lights under the doors, no sign they’ve heard him. He stands there in the hallway a long time, peeling away sounds until he can hear the Gagnon’s even, sleeping breaths.  

_ It’s so easy, _ he thinks, suddenly. No wonder these people are in trouble.  _ Anybody can just waltz in here and… _

It’s a weird train of thought and he shakes it off, gets back to work. The door on his left is Samuel Gagnon’s study, and Lionel puts a bug behind the earpiece of the antique, Bakelite phone on his desk for a laugh.

_ Well, not  _ **_anybody_ ** _ , _ he guesses. If he didn’t have the Machine helping him, he’d be showing up on security cameras, setting off alarms, the works. So they’d have to know the codes and either know or not care about the cameras. Family, maybe, except there isn’t family. A close friend, then. Or somebody who works for the security company; there’s an angle. He’ll have to look into that.

Lionel goes into the powder room next door, bugs the medicine cabinet there too. After that, he hits the guest room, which looks pretty untouched - flat bedspread with a clean, perfumed, dusty feel - but he bugs that room too, for the sake of completeness. He heads all the way down to the end of the hall. There’s a kind of reading nook, a big wide window that looks out over the backyard. As he’s hiding a microphone under a pillow, he looks out the window and sees the two dark, jagged tracks his footsteps left in the dew. Lionel frowns. Not something he would’ve had to worry about back home. Maybe it’ll go away by the time they wake up. Maybe they won’t notice and it won’t matter. Maybe...

The vague, sick feeling inside of him grows sharp, sharp enough that he makes a small sound. Because he only walked up to the house once. Because there should only be one track in the grass.

Downstairs, he hears a wet foot squeak on linoleum.

“Lionel,” the Machine murmurs, coolly, “you need to get in the linen closet now.”

He doesn’t argue, he just lunges for the closest door, finds it filled with towels, and closes it behind him as quietly as he can.

The linen closet isn’t made to hold much else other than towels, so Lionel lets the shelves press into his back and tries to make himself small.  _ Good luck, fat boy. _ The closet door is one of those ones that has wooden slats in it, like old fashioned Venetian blinds, and he inches further back, sucks his gut in, wishes he could disappear.

He hears a heavy footfall on the stair.

“Try to breathe quietly,” suggests the Machine, but his heart is hammering and he doesn’t think he can so he just takes a deep breath and holds. He reaches for the gun strapped against his ribs. He waits.

“Don’t move,” she says. “Stay there.”

The pad of his thumb nestles against the safety and he takes a little comfort from that.

The intruder is on the move. He can hear them near the other end of the hall. Whoever they are, they didn’t take off their shoes. They’re wearing heavy boots, he thinks, ‘cause the footfalls seem careful but they’re still so, so loud in this quiet house. He wonders why the Gagnons don’t wake up. He hopes they don’t, for their sakes. His sake, too.

The intruder is checking doors. Lionel hears the knobs turn, the doors unlatch. He thinks the intruder is opening them. Checking inside. His thumb rocks gently against the safety on his gun, desperately wanting to pull it back except he’s afraid of the noise it will make. His lungs are burning and he lets the littlest bit of air out, slow and silent, takes the littlest bit of air in through his nose. He presses his head back into the towels and catches an involuntary whiff of lavender detergent.

The intruder is moving towards him.

Through the slats he can see the dark shape. The intruder is tall, much taller than him. It’s a broad silhouette but that could just be the bulk that comes with a big jacket. Not necessarily muscle, he reassures himself. It could be some rail-thin tweaker in a parka, somebody with arms that Fusco could twist. He could be fine.

Or, he thinks, trying to gauge the width of the shoulders, or he could not be fine.

What he can see of the hair is long and ragged. He thinks there’s a beard. He can’t see the face.

There’s a strong smell, dirt and body odor, and Fusco wishes he hadn’t smelled it when his throat flexes and threatens to make him cough. He holds it together.

The shape passes him by. To go to the window, maybe. To look down and see what Fusco saw just a moment ago. Lionel moves as much as he dares, trying to get himself to an angle where he can see the intruder more clearly. He thinks this might be an opportunity to catch his guy unawares, to end this problem before it starts. Be proactive. He begins to ease the gun out of its holster.

The Machine whispers, “Lionel. Stay where you are.”

And he wants to tell it to go fuck itself because when did he ever agree to live his life according to what this toaster says, but...but. The toaster’s track record is pretty good so far.  The toaster is looking out for him.

He rests against the towels again, his hand locked tight around his gun, his heart hammering.

“Stay, Lionel.”

Footsteps scuffling in the hallway outside.

“Do not move. You will be safe.”

The shape comes back, heading the other way. His brain is whispering “shooting gallery”, taking him back to the academy, to firing round after round into silhouettes until he was perfect.

Lionel screws his eyes shut tight and bites down on the instinct.

He listens to the footsteps go, faster than they came. 

Then, for what seems like way too long, he’s standing alone in a linen closet, silently having a heart attack. He’s leaning against the door, his head resting on his forearm, his back clammy with sweat, when the Machine says, “You can come out now, Lionel.”

He shivers, full body, eases the door open and makes for the stairway as fast as he dares.

“Lionel, wait,” she says. “You need to bug their bedroom.”

He stands shivering, looking down at his escape route, screaming “Fuck you” in his head. He goes back.

The bedroom door eases open like silk, no sound to mar the soft rise and fall of their breath. He sees them, two lumps on either side of the king-size bed, about an ocean of mattress in between them. Roberta’s curls are an explosion of gray-blonde on the pillow, covering her face. Samuel’s foot is sticking out from under the covers, a thick wool sock hanging off. Lionel skirts around them gently. 

They both sleep on their sides, so he crouches low and bugs a jewelry box on what he guesses is Roberta’s dresser, at the foot of the bed and out of their line of sight. He crawls to the bathroom, across cool tile and over Roberta’s crumpled silk bathrobe, to plant a microphone smaller than his thumbnail under the lip of the sink. He rests there half a second, sweaty forehead pressed to the porcelain.

He spends an anxious ten minutes right outside their bedroom door, force pairing each of their phones. It’s at this point that he notices the tracks. Faint but visible - hiking boot treads outlined in wet dirt. He sighs and goes back to the linen closet, gets a hand towel.

He wipes up the dirt as best he can, following the trail down the hall, down the steps, across the kitchen floor and all the way to the sliding door. He peers out into the dark lawn, into the treeline. He sees nothing. It doesn’t make him feel better. He throws the hand towel away in the kitchen garbage because he’s too chickenshit to put it back.

“There’s no hurry,” the Machine tells him, soothingly. “They’re still asleep. You can take your time.”

He recloses the sliding door very carefully, lifts it up again so the latch catches near-silently. Then he sprints across the lawn in his socks and he doesn’t look back.

Wet branches whip across his face, scratch his arms and his legs, and he kicks more than a couple of tree roots, but Lionel can’t make himself slow down until he’s deep within the treeline. Until he’s out of sight. When he comes bursting out onto the nature trail, he clomps to a stop, bends double, hands on his knees, gasping for breath.

“What the fuck?” he whispers.

“Well done, Lionel.”

“What,” he gasps, “the  _ fuck _ ?”

“Don’t let it worry you,” she says. “Thank you for doing what I asked.”

“Was that him?” Lionel asks. “Was that the guy?”

The Machine goes silent. 

“Who  _ was  _ that?”

Nothing.

“Do I need to get out of here?”

“No, Lionel,” she says. “You’re perfectly safe.”

He starts giggling, has to cover his mouth with his hand.

“This is good, for your first time. Thank you for trusting me in there.”

He takes the hand away, straightens up, suddenly cold.

“It was for a reason,” she says. “I promise.”

He squints around in the dark, realizes why he feels like something’s missing.

He left Bear at his hiding spot at the edge of the treeline. Bear isn’t there anymore.

He looks up and down the trail. Bear isn’t anywhere.

“Bear?” he whispers, too loud. Nothing, no sound of a dog running through underbrush. No answering bark. “Bear?” he calls again, just a little bit louder.

Nothing.

His heart jumps. Because that’s his backup, and there’s a shape wandering loose in these woods and what if he got Sameen’s fucking dog killed and what if he’s alone out here in the woods with nothing and nobody and what the hell is he going to tell Lee if he comes back empty handed and what if…

Lionel forgets to be quiet, claps and lets out a long whistle that starts weak and trembly but ends loud and sharp. “Bear!” he shouts. “Hier!”

Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing, and then rustling, and then the stupid fucking dog comes ripping out of the underbrush and hits him like a train.

Lionel catches the brunt of Bear hard on his chest, nearly falls back. He’s excited, wriggling and licking Lionel’s hands and his face and jumping up to put paws on his shoulders. “Jesus,” Fusco whispers. “Jesus Christ, you scared the shit out of me, you dumb animal.” He grips Bear by his bony dog elbows, ruffles the fur on his face and at the base of his sharp ears. 

“Shouldn’t’ve yelled,” he murmurs, absently. “Am I OK?”

“I’m picking up a slight change in breathing,” the Machine says, “but nothing to suggest the Gagnons are awake.”

“Good. C’mon, boy.” He clicks his tongue, leads Bear to the treeline. When they’re at the edge of the lawn, he sinks to his knees with a grunt and paws through the leaves around him until he finds what he’s looking for. The stick is about two finger widths wide, a forearm length long, and dry enough to hold together.

“Alright, boy,” he murmurs, waving the stick. “Wanna cover for me?”

Bear sits up ramrod straight, eyes alive and excited.

Lionel draws his arm back and throws the stick hard through the tree branches, sending it spinning in a graceful arc out of the woods and into the smooth grass of the Gagnon’s backyard. “Go get it.”

Bear is already gone, whipping through the bushes at top speed. 

Bear does a wide victory lap through the yard, tearing a dark swathe through the dew on the grass, tearing through the tracks Lionel and the intruder left.  He returns to the woods and Lionel, stick clamped proudly in his jaws.

Lionel throws the stick for him about ten more times until the lawn is a mess of tracks and there are pawprints on the back porch and all the evidence points to an innocent game of fetch.

“Atta boy,” Lionel says as he bends to take the stick from a panting Bear. “Who’s a good alibi?”

Bear gives a gentle warning growl when Lionel pulls on the stick. He gives it up for dead. 

Lionel leans against a tree, watching day break over the Gagnon’s lawn while Bear demolishes the stick by his feet. “I saw four tracks in the grass,” he says, nonchalantly. “Is that guy out here with me?”

She says, “You don’t need to be afraid of him. He’s not here for you.”

“Doesn’t make me feel any better. Who is he?”

The Machine is silent.

“You know,” he says, “I don’t do this ‘cause I like getting lied to. If you’re gonna be keeping secrets from me, I’d just as soon go back into retirement ‘cause I’m not going through that bullshit again.”

“It won’t be a secret forever,” she says. “But I need you to focus on the Gagnons right now. Please, Lionel?”

He sighs. “You gonna patch me into their microphones?”

“If you like.”

“I do.”

All at once, his ear is filled with sleepy breath, with the squeak of bedsprings. “They’re waking up,” says the Machine.

“Sounds like it.”

“Are you very tired?” she asks him. She doesn’t sound embarrassed, ‘cause Root never did, but there’s something kind of...surprised in that question. Like the idea just occurred to her.

“Yeah. Little bit,” he admits. “Too keyed up to sleep, though.”

“Good,” she says. “There may be time for you to sleep later, if you like.”

“OK. I’ll keep you posted.”

“Thank you, Lionel.” She pauses. “I want you to know that I’m going to help you. And that you don’t need to worry.”

“Got it,” he says.

He nestles against the tree and watches daylight break over the Gagnon house while he listens for the stray snap of a twig. His hand is on his gun.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just so people are aware: the casefic/Number plot goes in a non-graphic domestic violence direction in this chapter, so use your own best judgment.

He shudders awake when a fat drop of water splats on the back of his neck.

 

As the morning grew brighter, he sank further down against the tree and now he’s lying on his stomach again, masked by a tangle of tall grass and briars, watching the Gagnons through high-powered binoculars.

 

And somehow, he managed to fall asleep.

 

Lionel checks his watch. Not for long, only a minute or two. He’s pretty sure he hasn’t missed anything.

 

The Gagnons, he’s learning, aren’t big talkers. 

 

He’s picking up the creak of a mattress, pained groans of “why-the-fuck-am-I-awake”, running water, the flush of a toilet. Somebody makes it downstairs and starts the coffee percolating and if he listens in on the kitchen microphone, that’s pretty strong in the mix. Nobody’s saying anything. There’s no alarm clock either; they’re both that freak-of-nature type of person that wakes up when the sun does.

 

Bear sighs, rests his chin on Lionel’s back.

 

“Hey, me too,” he murmurs. He swipes water off the back of his neck.

 

“Are you bored, Lionel?” asks the Machine.

 

Samuel Gagnon appears at the sliding glass doors, coffee in hand, barely alive. Lionel refocuses his binoculars. “Oh, yeah,” he says, leaning in on his elbows like that will help him see better. “Real bored.”

 

Lionel already had an idea of what the guy looked like. His cursory social media research showed him a put-together, healthy-looking man who had just hit the wrong side of 50 and was starting to show his age. Good-looking, in a boxy, 1960’s kind of way. Outdated images, but only by six months.

 

And of course, Lionel saw him in the flesh last night, but he’d been afraid to look too closely at either one of them while he was creeping around their house. It felt too bold, too much like pushing his luck.

 

So he isn’t completely prepared for the drawn, wasted man he sees through his binoculars. Even through the thickness of his bathrobe, it kinda looks like somebody shrank Sam Gagnon in the wash, his 1960s boxy frame drawn back into a kind of eerie wiriness. His cheekbones are sharp and worn with stubble, eyes are sunken. 

 

Fusco knows that rock bottom isn’t always a thing you can see, that a sharp guy can hide that kind of thing behind a good suit and a smile stuck on tight, but these things can be obvious too. Just as plain as the nose on your face. “So,” he says to the Machine, like they’re chatting, “that guy had a rough couple of months, huh?”

 

“What makes you think so?”

 

“He looks like complete shit. Is he sick?”

 

“He hasn’t been to a doctor in several months,” the Machine says. She adds, “Neither have you.”

 

“I’m wanted by the FBI. I’m allowed to skip my physical.” Lionel fiddles with the dials on his binoculars, drawing Sam’s face closer in his view. Close enough to see the bags under his eyes. “Stick to the subject.”

 

“Since he was fired from his job six months ago, Samuel Gagnon leaves his house rarely and maintains a limited social circle.”

 

“There we go,” Lionel murmurs, low in his gut. “That could make for a rough couple of months. How’d he get fired?”

 

“A series of failures,” she says. “Errors in judgement. Mistakes. Erratic behavior. His employers were lenient at first, because of his impressive record. But over time, it couldn’t be ignored.” 

 

“Oh, yeah?”

 

“His incompetence ultimately resulted in a net loss of $2.7 million.”

 

Lionel muffles the mean little laugh that bursts out of him in the grass. He feels Bear lift his head from Lionel’s back reproachfully at the disturbance. “That might explain it,” he allows. Lionel shifts against the ground, relieves pressure on his ribs. “He drinking?”

 

“Sometimes. Infrequently to excess.”

 

“Drugs?”

 

“Not that I’ve seen.”

 

“A mental thing? Is he seeing a shrink?”

 

“No. Why, would you recommend it?”

 

There’s something knowing in her voice that twists at him, something that implies  _ Because you have so much experience _ . It reminds him that he hasn’t gone to see a shrink since before he left New York, and that if things hadn’t gone all wrong for him, he’d probably still be going. It reminds him that he’s guilty about it.

 

“How should I know? Haven’t met the guy.” He coughs once. If he gets sick ‘cause this fucking robot made him lie around in cold, wet dirt for hours... “I’m just thinking that if a guy who used to be pretty good at his job suddenly becomes lousy at his job, there’s probably something else going on his his head. You know?”

 

No answer. Maybe she doesn’t know.

 

“Any other minor details you wanna fill me in on? They lose all their money? Lose a kid?”

 

“Roberta received a promotion and an increase in salary. The Gagnons have remained financially stable. They have no children. No family.”

 

“But they got an enemy.”

 

“Do they?”

 

“Maybe I’m judgemental,” he says, “but I don’t think that guy in their house last night was there to borrow a cup of sugar.”

 

“Lionel,” she says. “ _ You _ were in their house last night.”

 

He’s all ready to fire back about how this is  _ different  _ when his attention is caught by some movement at the picture window on the top floor. The exact one he looked out of last night, when he noticed the footprints on the grass. Roberta stands beneath the arch, staring out the window. Staring out at him.

 

Lionel shrinks into the bracken before he realizes she hasn’t seen him, that she’s just using her reflection in the window to put on her earrings. 

 

She’s ready for work and Lionel’s kind of impressed. As far as he can tell, she’s been awake for about 20 minutes, which is about how long it took Lionel to get his shit together back when he was working, and that’s without giving a shit what he looked like. This lady clearly does.

 

Roberta winds her thick, curly hair into a knot at the back of her head, a clip clenched in her teeth. She snaps open her purse and examines the contents, pulls out items one by one, murmuring to herself as she goes. He can hear her through her phone and the microphone by the picture window, performing her inventory in a sing-song - “Keeeys, keys,  _ keys _ ,  _ phone _ ,  _ wallet _ , lip balm?  _ Lip balm _ .” She takes her car keys in hand, snaps her purse shut and shrugs it onto her shoulder. She shuts her eyes. He can hear her breathing, deep, soothing breaths.

 

“OK,” she whispers. “You’re OK.” She clenches her keys in her fist.

 

“Things going OK for her at work?” Lionel asks as she turns away from the window.

 

“She’s talented,” the Machine says, “and the people she works for know it. She’s likely to be promoted again.”

 

“Hmmm.” Lionel refocuses his binoculars as he turns his attention back to Sam. “How does  _ he  _ feel about that?”

 

“That’s a very good question, Lionel.”

 

He’s still tuned into Roberta’s phone and he can hear her walking down the stairs. Slowly. The click of her shoes is muted, careful in his ears. Kinda too quiet, like she’s rolling through each step as carefully as she can. Like she’s sneaking.

 

“Are you going?” snarls Sam Gagnon on the back of his audio and her footsteps stop dead and Fusco gets a sinking, cold sensation. 

 

The Machine says, “That’s part of why we’re here.”

 

Sam has his back turned to the glass door. Looking at Roberta, Lionel guesses, down that short hallway parallel to the stairs. She must be close to the front door, real close.

 

“Yeah,” he hears Roberta say. “I’m just -”

 

“It’s early,” Sam says, “and I made coffee.” Lionel almost switches frequencies, but Sam gets a little bit louder as he speaks. Moving closer to Roberta. “Why don’t you stay a while?”

 

None of the things he’s saying are specifically threatening, but. Something about the way he says it. The way Roberta comes to a hesitating stop. The way her breath changes, shivers. Lionel pushes up onto his hands and knees.

 

“Lionel…” the Machine warns.

 

“I know,” Roberta is saying, (apologizing?), “but I have a meeting first thing and I wanted to…”

 

“ _ You wanted to _ ,” he repeats, turning the phrase over in his mouth and examining it like it’s something slightly funny, something stupid. “This is not about what you  _ want _ .”

 

Her breath catches. They’re too far back in the house for him to see so Lionel’s head is trying to supply body language from tone - tight shoulders, clenched fists, cold and fearful stares. But of course, it’s his imagination, and he can’t really know what it looks like in there. What they’re doing.

 

But he can recognize an ugly scene when he hears one.

 

“It’s my  _ job _ ,” she says, but she already sounds defeated, like she’s already had this argument too many times and she lost every round before.

 

“Your job…” Sam’s voice is low, but growing very slowly louder. He’s closing in, Lionel thinks. “...is here. With me.”

 

“ _ My job _ is what pays for this house. For our food, Sam, for everything. I am bankrolling this whole-”

 

He lets out this burst of sound that makes Lionel jump, that makes Roberta knock into something. It’s a laugh, Lionel thinks after a second. A laugh without the humor. Sam is saying, “Do you even remember what we’re doing here? We had a plan!”

 

“Yeah, well.” Her voice rises, shivers. “Plans have changed. I like it here. I like my job. I’m not giving it up just because…”

 

“It’s over,” he says. “I am not going to sit here and let you play career girl while everything we work for falls ap-”

 

“I am  _ not  _ playing,” she interrupts, “and I am not obligated to fail just because you did.”

 

A sound like a hard slap, a thud, and Lionel is on his feet. 

 

“Lionel, get down!” the Machine orders.

 

“What am I supposed to do, let him…?”

 

All at once, there’s a sharp, male cry of pain, the slam of a door, the sound of rapid breaths and running feet. Seconds later, he hears a car door slam and Roberta gunning the engine.

 

“Holy shit,” Lionel whispers.

 

“Lionel,” the Machine repeats. “Get down. Before he sees you.”

 

Grudgingly, Lionel sinks into the bracken again. “Guess I know why we’re here now.”

 

“Thank you for being patient, Lionel.”

 

On his stomach in the dirt again, Lionel switches over to the microphone in the hallway just in time to hear Sam mutter, “Bitch,” to no one in particular. No footsteps. No sounds of struggle. No sounds like he’s about to chase his wife down.

 

“Alright,” Lionel sighs. “What’s the plan? I could go in there now and have a talk with him now, while she’s at work. Get it over with.”

 

“I appreciate your work ethic, Lionel. But I’d prefer you wait.”

 

Lionel frowns. “What are we waiting for? Did you see how many guns they had in there? If he’s alone with her again…”

 

“Roberta stops to get coffee every morning before she goes to work,” the Machine interrupts. “Please use this as an opportunity to make contact.”

 

“But he’s right there!” Lionel hisses in protest. “Give me ten minutes. I can toss that guy down the stairs, make it look like an accident, and be home to pick up Lee by lunchtime. Problem solved.”

 

“I’ll keep that in mind, Lionel,” the Machine says after a moment. “In the meantime, please trust me.”

 

“Fine,” he mutters. “Root woulda gone for it.”

 

“Root would have trusted me.”

 

Lionel sighs. “I said fine, didn’t I?” Crankily, he rises to his feet, brushing the dirt off his knees.

 

“Hurry along, Lionel,” she says.

 

“Yeah, yeah.”

 

It’s a slow walk back to the car. Lionel’s tired and aching and stiff-kneed and Bear’s not helping. He keeps stopping in the middle of the path and looking back, tail wagging, big stupid dog smile on his face.

 

“Come on, stupid,” Lionel says, grabbing Bear by the collar and pulling him up the trail. “I swear to god, if I find out you rolled in something or ate a dead animal or whatever…”

 

Bear whines. 

 

“We’ll be back soon,” Lionel says, patting Bear’s side. “I promise.”

 

* * *

 

It’s easier to follow someone in the country, he’s learning. There’s no safety in numbers, no way to melt into a densely packed crowd. That goes for the follower as well as the followee, he figures, but Lionel’s pretty good at playing invisible and he likes not having to worry about Roberta slipping around a corner and disappearing forever. It’s kind of a relief.

 

And yeah, the tracker he put on her car doesn’t hurt.

 

He catches up with her close to the highway. She’s not speeding, not doing anything evasive, and when he asks the Machine, she says this is the way Roberta normally drives to work, so Lionel’s OK with giving her a bit of space. He lingers two, three cars behind her and when she turns off to stop for coffee, he stops too.

 

He doesn’t think he’d know she was upset if she didn’t roll over the curb just a little bit. If she didn’t sit for a while after parking with her mirror down. Fixing her face, he guesses. 

 

“Alright,” he says, putting the truck in park. “What’s the plan?”

 

“Make contact. Engage her in conversation.”

 

“That’s all?”

 

“That’s all.”

 

“Is there a...am I trying to learn something? Am I distracting her? Anything you want me to say in particular?” A few parking spaces away, Roberta emerges from her car.

 

The Machine asks, “Are you capable of making contact?”

 

“Yeah. Fine. Just wish I knew what was going on.”

 

“Trust me.” 

 

“Yeah, yeah.” Lionel spots a brightly-colored pawprint decal on the glass door of the coffee shop and decides that means Bear’s coming with him. “Come on, boy.”

 

Bear charges through the gap between the two front seats and climbs over Lionel’s lap to exit the car. “Country living,” Lionel murmurs grimly as he retrieves Bear’s leash from the glove compartment, “is turning you into a real dick. You know that?”

 

Bear wags his tail.

 

They give Roberta a little bit of breathing room, count to twenty before they go in after her and slide, quiet and ordinary, into line behind her. Lionel stares at her back - the neat navy jacket with its square shoulders and sleek shape, her immaculately piled hair - and wonders how to proceed. 

 

Not that he doesn’t know how to approach a woman, or any stranger for that matter. That’s all he’s done for the past six months. He chats, he makes friends, he digs in deep until no one thinks to ask what he’s doing here, where he came from. Until he becomes part of the wallpaper.

 

He cannot, under any circumstances, become part of the wallpaper here.

 

It’s Bear who catches her attention. She must see him out of the corner of her eye, or perhaps she sees other people looking. People always look at Bear, out here. Back home, people had all kinds of fancy dogs and Bear could blend into the crowd just like Lionel, but out here, where people employ dogs, he sticks out. People want to know what job he does - Hunting dog? Herding dog? Guard dog? - and they’ll ask Lionel about it. And Lionel will have to pretend he knows what he’s talking about.

 

Lionel, for the record, never really wanted a dog. Not even when he was a kid. The little yappy ones about the size of your shoe didn’t bother him so much, but the big ones with the teeth…

 

Figures he’d end up dogsitting this Dutch murderhound all the time.

 

Roberta is peering down at Bear, a shy smile playing over her lips. Her tense fingers uncurl. People do this, he’s noticed. They make eye contact with the dog first, then him. He guesses that’s good for his cover.

 

On cue, she lifts her head, looks him in the eye.

 

She looks almost as nice as she did in the window, before her husband attacked her. She must have fixed herself up in the car, redid her hair, fixed up her makeup, and you’d never know anything was wrong except her eyes are puffy and ringed in pink, startlingly blue. Except for the faintest edge of a bruise peeking out from beneath a carefully arranged sweep of hair high on her forehead.

 

She hesitates. Her lip quirks, tense.  _ Look normal, Lionel, _ he tells himself. He does his best.

 

“He’s beautiful,” she says, gesturing at Bear. “May I?”

 

Lionel nods, finds his words. “Go for it.”

 

She bends, scratches Bear’s cheeks and his fluffy ears. “What a beautiful boy,” she murmurs.

 

“Don’t let him hear you,” Lionel says. “He’s already full of himself.”

 

She chuckles, perhaps a little too loud, with a little bit of a hiccup as she worries Bear’s head in her hands. Inspiration strikes.

 

“Actually,” he says, “would you mind holding onto him for me? Bear’s good for the most part, but he’s a real pain about waiting in line. Gets antsy, impatient. Haggles with the cashier. It’s a whole thing. If it’s not too much trouble, I’d be happy to get your coffee for you.”

 

She eyes him, appraising, suspicious. When she steals a glance down at Bear, he flashes a big doggy grin and dances a little on the end of his leash, nails clicking on the tile floor.  _ This guy _ , Fusco thinks, shaking his head.  _ Fucking method. _

 

“Throw in a muffin?” Fusco offers. “Anything to get rid of him.”

 

She hesitates, brightens very slightly. “I’d prefer a bagel.”

 

“Sure,” he says. “Whatever you want.”

 

“And a medium coffee? Black. No sugar.”

 

“OK. Got it. Thank you so much.” He passes her Bear’s leash and Roberta pulls on it, very gently.

 

“Come on, boy,” she says, encouragingly.

 

Bear stays put, glances up at Lionel for instructions.

 

“He doesn’t speak English,” Lionel explains. “ _ Voor uit _ , buddy.”

 

Bear follows Roberta’s lead and she casts a look back at Lionel over her shoulder, surprised. Considering.

 

That may have been a mistake.

 

Still, he thinks, this isn’t remotely the toughest spot he’s been in. Honestly, he’s amazed that this is going as smoothly as it is. What if she didn’t like dogs? He’d be fucked. John must’ve had some other thing going on, other than the dog, to pull these kinds of things off.

 

John, Lionel thinks, is lucky he was a good-looking guy, ‘cause if Lionel tried to pull half the stuff John pulled, he’d be getting pepper-sprayed on the regular.

 

But Lionel never had to pull the kind of stuff John pulled. Lionel had his badge. He had that easy, faintly authoritative belonging. He knows what he would’ve done if he’d run across Roberta back then. He would’ve asked how she got that bruise, he would’ve asked _ is somebody hurting you _ , and if she said  _ nothing  _ and  _ nobody _ , ‘cause people do that sometimes, if they’re scared, he would’ve passed her his card and said  _ if anybody tries hurting you, call this number and somebody will put a stop to it because you don’t have to put up with that _ and sometimes, sometimes they call.

 

Sometimes they don’t, but you’ve got a little time to yourself after work so you follow the guy and you wait and you watch until you see something actionable and you get the guy sent up for ten years on a dope charge, so that solves that. 

 

That’s not really an option for him anymore. Lionel doesn’t even have a card to hand this woman. He can’t send anybody up on any charges. He can’t even do his old magic trick - step right up and before your eyes, I’ll make this scumbag  _ disappear  _ \- ‘cause the Machine doesn’t want to get its robot hands dirty.

 

He doesn’t quite know what he’ll say to Roberta now.

 

He gets coffee for the pair of them, gets a bagel for Roberta and springs the extra 99 cents for a little container of cream cheese. He buys a dog biscuit that’s as long as the palm of his hand and half-dipped in white chocolate from a glass cookie jar on the counter, because he wants to look like somebody who’s a sap about their dog.

 

And also, he admits, ‘cause he’s kind of a sap about the dog.

 

When he comes back to Roberta, she has Bear’s head in her lap and her eyes are a lot less puffy. She is pulled-together, upright, cautiously friendly.

 

“What kind of dog is he?” she asks as he sets their cups of coffee on the table.

 

“Belgian Malinois.” There’s an accent, a set of vowels doing funny things in that name and Lionel can’t quite master the shape of it. He promises himself not to try to sound clever again. If anybody asks, Bear’s a German Shepherd from now on.

 

“They’re military dogs, aren’t they?” she presses. “And police?”

 

“Most of the time.” He rests his arm on the back of Bear’s neck, scratches under his chin. “This one mainly eats shoes.”

 

Bear’s tongue lolls out of his mouth. He keeps taking slightly desperate glances at the treat sitting on the edge of the table.  _ Keep it together, dog. Help me pull this off. Then you get your overpriced fuckin’ cookie _ .

 

“Is he a rescue?” she asks. People always want to know that. It’s inevitable.  _ Is this an ethically sourced dog? _

 

“Yeah,” Lionel says, nodding solemnly. “He’s been through a few owners and at least one of them was a real dirtbag.”  _ Basically all the ones I know were dirtbags, _ he thinks.  _ They were good to the dog, though _ .

 

“Poor boy,” she says, scratching down Bear’s back and sides. “Not anymore, though. You’re spoiling him.”

 

“Yeah?”

 

She pats Bear’s side, three solid, friendly thwacks.

 

“Guess he has put on a little weight,” Lionel admits.

 

“You’re not from here,” Roberta remarks, suddenly sharp-eyed. “New York?”

 

He thinks about lying. That’s what he does most of the time when people ask where he’s from, what his accent is, but he thinks he got too relaxed, too far into the old role and his voice is betraying him. Probably claiming to be from Townson, Maryland would make her more suspicious, not less. “Yeah, originally,” he says. “You?”

 

She doesn’t answer that one. Not that it matters; Lionel’s read her profile and he knows she’s from Portland. The one in Maine, not Oregon. “What brought you to Hooksett, Mr…?”

 

Two can avoid answering questions. “I’m here to help out an old friend.”

 

“Oh?” She leans forward in her chair. “It’s a small town. Maybe I know them.”

 

“I wouldn’t like say,” he says, gently waving her interest away. “It’s a personal problem.”

 

“Oh.” She settles back, faintly disappointed.

 

“Benefit of early retirement.” He grins. “I have the kind of free time where I can drop everything if a friend needs a hand.”

 

That hangs between them, awkward and hard-edged. Too heavy, too inelegant. 

 

“And it gets me out of the house,” he admits, taking a long, slow sip of his coffee. “It’s kinda dull. Hard to meet people.”

 

“Is this how you meet women, then?”

 

He sputters, chokes a little. “What?”

 

She’s smiling very faintly, thin-lipped and...amused, maybe. “You claim that your obviously well-trained dog has behavioral issues and ask me to keep an eye on him. Presumably so you have an excuse to speak to me.” Her voice takes on an accusatory twist. “Is this how you meet women?”

 

Lionel clears his throat, pats his chest a little. “I don’t meet women,” he says, self-deprecating. He feels his face heating up and he lets it happen because he figures the kind of guy he’s pretending to be, the kind of guy who isn’t a threat to her, he might get a little red in the face. “That’s not what I’m up to. I, uh, I saw your ring when I came in. I know you’re off the market.”

 

She flinches when he mentions that. Her hand darts to her ring finger and for a second Lionel panics because that right there, that was an assumption and maybe she isn’t wearing a ring and maybe he shouldn’t know she’s married and maybe this is all about to take a turn, but it’s there when she twists it between her fingers, a little gold band with an unassuming rock.

 

“I just looked at you and thought - sorry if I was jumping to conclusions - but I thought maybe you were having a rough time of it. And I thought maybe you’d like to hang out with a dog for a while.” He lets his mouth crook in a shy smile. “Was I wrong?”

 

Roberta relaxes by a small degree. “No,” she admits. She scratches Bear’s ears. “It was a difficult morning.”

 

“Well, uh, not to stick my nose where it’s not wanted, but...you wanna talk about it?”

 

“No, thank you,” she says, faintly brittle.

 

“‘S alright,” Lionel says, holding up one hand in surrender. “It’s not my business. And I’m sure you’ve got places to be.”

 

“Yes.” She says it in a funny way, defensive but lost, as though she’s forgotten where she’s supposed to be or how to get out of this low-down chair she’s in. Like all the energy is drained out off her.

 

Lionel gets up, winces as his knees pop, and holds out a hand to her. “Hey,” he says. “You OK?”

 

Roberta takes his hand hesitantly and he pulls her to her feet. She’s taller than him, he finds, by just a little bit. She stares at him for a moment, not really breathing, and then says, “No.”

 

His brow furrows, as though this is news. “No?”

 

She shakes her head. “No. I’m really not OK. But, ah, sometimes things just aren’t going to be OK. So it doesn’t matter. And you just have to keep going, even though it never, ever will be OK.” She takes a deep, shuddering breath. “Do you understand?

 

Lionel nods, slowly, ‘cause he does, kinda. Not quite in the same way, but he knows the feeling.

 

She shoulders her bag. “Thanks for the coffee, mister,” she says and as she pushes by him, adds, “I like your dog.”

 

Impulsively, he touches her sleeve and she comes to a sharp stop. “Again, it’s not my business,” he says, very softly, so only the two of them can hear. “But if things really aren’t OK...like the kind of OK where somebody’s bruising you, there are people you can go to. You don’t have to deal with it on your own.”

 

Roberta turns her head, looks him dead in the eye, her mouth pulled in a stiff, painful smile. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says, icy and calm. “Good luck with your friend.” For an instant, the expression frozen on her face flickers. “Thank you,” she says, “for asking how I was.”

 

And then she’s gone.

 

Lionel sinks back down in his seat, takes a rueful sip of his coffee. “That didn’t feel good,” he murmurs into his coffee cup.

 

“It was serviceable,” the Machine says. “You gave me what I needed.”

 

“I don’t know what you think you’re getting out of that, but…”

 

“Please trust me,” she says. “You did very well, Lionel.”

 

Lionel picks up the dog treat from the table and Bear snaps to attention. “The dog did at least as much,” he says.

 

“I can’t speak with the dog.”

 

Lionel hefts the treat up and down in his hand, watches the dog’s still, erect head, his excited eyes. “You tell him ‘good boy’,” he says. “He’ll get it.”

 

“Good boy,” attempts the Machine.

 

Lionel tosses the treat up and Bear snatches it out of the air and begins demolishing it under the table. “Good boy,” Lionel repeats.


End file.
